Ion Agârbiceanu, Romanian journalist, politician, and archbishop (d. 1963)
Ion Agârbiceanu (first name also Ioan, last name also Agărbiceanu and Agîrbiceanu; September 12, 1882 – May 28, 1963) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian writer, journalist, politician, theologian and Greek-Catholic priest. Born among the Romanian peasant class of Transylvania, he was originally an Orthodox, but chose to embrace Eastern Catholicism. Assisted by the Catholic congregation of Blaj, he graduated from Budapest University, after which he was ordained. Agârbiceanu was initially assigned to a parish in the Apuseni Mountains, which form the backdrop to much of his fiction. Before 1910, Agârbiceanu had achieved literary fame in both Transylvania and the Kingdom of Romania, affiliating with Astra cultural society in 1912; his work was disputed between the rival schools of Sămănătorul and Poporanism. After a debut in poetry, he became a highly prolific author of novels, novellas, and other forms of prose, being rated as "Chekhovian" or "Tolstoyan" for his talents in describing the discreet suffering of common folk.
Agârbiceanu became involved politically with the Romanian National Party, siding with its more radical offshoot, under Octavian Goga. Committed to social and cultural activism in Transylvania, Agârbiceanu spent the 1910s officiating near Sibiu, with a break during World War I that saw him taking refuge in the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian People's Republic, and eventually the Moldavian Democratic Republic. He served as a chaplain for the Romanian Volunteer corps, and was decorated for his service. In 1919, Agârbiceanu moved to Cluj, where he lived for most of the remainder of his life. After the war, he involved himself in both the political and cultural life of Greater Romania. He moved between the National Peasants' Party, the People's Party, and the National Agrarian Party, all while remaining engaged with organizing specifically Greek-Catholic interest groups. Already in the 1920s, Agârbiceanu expressed disappointment with the cultural decline he felt was encouraged by an emerging political class, embracing instead radical-right positions and eugenics, while also demanding administrative decentralization and encouraging the peasantry to improve its economic standing. Voted into the Romanian Academy, he served terms in the Assembly of Deputies, and assumed the office of Senate vice president under the National Renaissance Front dictatorship.
As editor and columnist at Tribuna, Agârbiceanu decried Hungarian revisionism and openly supported the politics of King Carol II as a means to solidify union. He was eventually forced out of Northern Transylvania during World War II. He spent his last decade and a half under a communist regime that outlawed his church, an act in which he refused to cooperate. Much of his work, with its transparent Christian moralizing, proved incompatible with the new ideology, and was banned by communist censors; however, especially after 1953, the regime found him useful for its image, and bestowed honors upon him. He was never allowed to publish his complete works, and continued to struggle with his censors during his final years. Agârbiceanu's full contribution has been made available and reappraised since the 1990s, but he endures as a largely forgotten author, with the possible exception of his Apuseni-based novella, Fefeleaga.